Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature

Wales, Eden

Paperback

Literary CriticismBlack American StudiesWomen's Studies

ISBN10: 1496827341
ISBN13: 9781496827340
Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
Published: Feb 28 2020
Pages: 244
Weight: 0.80
Height: 0.55 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Winner of the 2020 Eudora Welty Prize

Theorists emphasize the necessity of writing about--or witnessing--trauma in order to overcome it. To this critical conversation, Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma: Confronting Race, Gender, and Violence in American Literature treats reader response to traumatic and testimonial literature written by and about African American women and adds insight into the engagement of testimonial literature. Eden Wales articulates a theory of reading (or dual-witnessing) that explores how narrators and readers can witness trauma together. She places these original theories of traumatic reception in conversation with the African American literary tradition to speak to the histories, cultures, and traumas of African Americans, particularly the repercussions of slavery, as witnessed in African American literature. The volume also considers intersections of race and gender and how narrators and readers can cross such constructs to witness collectively.

Reading Testimony, Witnessing Trauma's innovative examinations of raced-gendered intersections open and speak with those works that promote dual-witnessing through the fraught (literary) histories of race and gender relations in America. To explicate how dual-witnessing converses with American literature, race theory, and gender criticism, the book analyzes emancipatory narratives by Sojourner Truth, Harriet Jacobs, and Elizabeth Keckley and novels by William Faulkner, Zora Neale Hurston, Margaret Walker, Toni Morrison, and Jesmyn Ward.

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